Catching up…

So I thought I would easily catch right up with the school work after my surgery. WRONG. Long story short: doctor found more than he thought he would during surgery, so instead of two week recovery time, Lynn gets a four week recovery period complete with painkillers and weird rehabilitation devices. Thus despite having a week to do my IML assignment, I had to ask for an extension. I just couldn’t do it with all the meds I was on. Fortunately, I did get it in – only one day late.

Now I’m in catch-up mode. Let’s hope for no more set backs.

I also want to just say publicly that my Mom is awesome for coming out from Louisiana to help me, and my boyfriend, Phil, has just been spectacular all around

Yo.

So I know I haven’t posted in a while. During the on-campus session I stayed at the Historic Lincoln Hotel, which is very, very awesome, but very, very without the in-room internet access. Not very blog-friendly, really. I enjoyed my trip because it’s always so nice to see all my school buddies and experience life outside of LA for a while. I also enjoy it because I eat horribly – utterly terribly – during my visit. Seriously, it’s like I go, “Um, could you put some cheese and gravy on that?” whenever and wherever I eat while in C-U.

I also liked my classes. We installed Apache and Greenstone on the school Linux servers for my DIL class (wheee!) and Information Modeling was, well, Information Modeling – but that was fun too. I always learn so much in each IML class that my brain hurts just a bit when the session is over. Oh! I also learned that New Balance sneakers are apparently the sneaker of choice for UIUC. I swear, everyone had them.

Alas, post-visit, I have fallen behind a bit. The burnout and crazy stuff going on at my workplace has caused me to slip. I’m turning all my assignments in on time, but I’m having to skip a lot of the readings in order to get other stuff done. Here’s the (sorta) good news: I’m having knee surgery on Monday! I get to stay home for two weeks! I’ve got tons of time to do school work! I really, really hope to start catching up next week. First order of business will be knocking my second IML assignment out of the way and then I’ll move on to the reading. Wish me luck.

The freak out has begun…

So the freak out has hit. I had a mild panic attack/realization last Thursday that I had A LOT of homework d due in the next week and I have spent the last few days busting my chops to catch up. I’m feeling a little better now, but I think I’ll feel much better when I finish my digital libraries paper that’s due a week from Thursday and get through my first Information Modeling assignment (whenever that gets assigned).

That being said, I’m happy to announce that I’m now the webbmistress for the ACRL student group – mostly because I already redid their site as part of my Web Design class project. Still, I’m excited about this. Hopefully I won’t screw it up.

As for my classes in general, I still really like Information Modeling although the homework is getting harder and more and more like algebra everyday. My mind bends a bit everytime I work on some of it and I often go to bed with a headache. Digital libraries is okay. A lot of what we’re going over is repetitive with what I learned in Electronic Publishing a year ago, so I’m eagerly anticipating getting on to newer stuff. I’m also sweating a little under the workload for this class. Not that it’s extreme, but just hard to manage with the Information Modeling work and the chaos that is my job.

Anyway, that’s the update for now. I’m going to bo back to freaking out now.

If only they made bumper stickers, or had an honor roll, for that matter.

Two perfect scores. I did not miss a single point in either class for this semester. Yay me.

Damn, it’s HOT

A+ on the user guide, y’all. Yeah, baby! Cop out my ass!

Sorry.

You can probably tell that the end of the semester crunch is starting to get to me. While I think I finally have my web redesign project sorta done (man, CSS can be a bitch, especially when it comes to tables), I gotta write three papers in the next two weeks. I can totally do it – I just don’t wanna. I’m tired and HOT. Did I say HOT? Because it’s HOT. Stupid HOT. Africa HOT.

LA is not normally HOT. I mean, it crosses 90 every once in a while, in August, for a day or two, and we all bitch about it. It does not cross 90 in July, for two weeks straight. LA also is never humid, which has been all week long. The last two days have been particularly bad. I’ve been sticky all weekend. I hate sticky. So anyway, it’s made working over a warm laptop in a very warm apartment (with no air conditioning) very miserable.

Oh well, in two weeks the semester will be over and I’ll be on a plane to Cancun so I can have that rendezvous with the swim-up bar.

I’ll stop my whining now and get back to work.

Almost done with 4

The end of semester four is in sight. Word of advise to anyone going to grad school and working full time:

Don’t take 8 units during the summer.

My classes aren’t hard, per se – at least the content isn’t. There’s just so much work. I’m doing assignments every, single, day. Besides, all the other maniacs who signed up for 8 units and who don’t find the content easy get very bitchy and defensive.

I’m in a “peer group” for reviewing assignments for my reference class, and one person has a screen image in her Word document that looks awful on a screen and when I print it out. She tries to put an entire web page in like a 1/4 of a printed page. So, since I’m supposed to give her feedback, I tell her that the image is blurry and she might want to do something else with it. She writes back, admits it’s blurry, and asks for suggestions. I give her three suggestions, only one of which is that she turns her assignment into a web page, and I get this message back (copied to the entire group) about how her image prints out just fine, making a web page is a “cop out” (my assignment is done as a web page, mind you), and she wants feedback from other people. Damn. I wrote her back with a simple “if it prints out fine, then don’t worry about it” note and silently decided to let her hang herself. No more feedback from me. We get graded, by the way, partly on how well we work with others in our group, so I’m not going there with her.

I guess I’m a little stunned because while I’ve worked with flakes on group projects for class, I had not yet encountered a crank. I guess I was lucky to go this long.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to the end of this semester. Neither of my classes are bad, but they aren’t exactly inspiring either. I’m also getting a bit burned out from doing all this work.

Almost done….almost done….

Back in the Wardall Again…

Ah, the dorms. I can happily say that they haven’t gotten worse; in fact, they’ve gotten slightly better with the addition of air conditioning controls and an eliptical machine.

I arrived in C-U much later than I had planned last night due to a delayed flight and an odd taxi cab ride. The taxi ride involved a driver with 13 kids, a woman who refused to say directly where she lived, and an Australian who would constantly yell, “JESUS CHRIST!” and talked a lot about the French Revolution. Yeah, it was a long ride. Thankfully, I had my Skymeal to keep me happy.

Oh my gosh, y’all: Skymeals, rock. I had the European brunch thingie, and not only was it enough food to feed me all day long, it was yummy, came in a koozie thing with ice packs and had a cute little salt n’ pepper shaker shaped like a plane. Worth the $$, y’all.

Anyway, it’s raining and chilly-ish here (60s), and Reference was okay. Mostly boring, but okay. The people in my peer group are nice, and I think the work shouldn’t be too hard to do. The reference tools we’re working with, like Infoplease are cool, but I’m still pretty sure I don’t want to be a reference librarian. After years of tech support, I’m kinda done answering people’s questions directly.

Tomorrow is Web Design, and I have slightly higher hopes for that.

Another semester, another trip

So I fly out to Champaign once again this Friday. Instead of putting the on-campus session mid-semester, the summer semester kicks off with the trip. I kinda wish it wouldn’t, but then the semester is only 7 weeks long. I guess I understand.

Work has been ugly, y’all, and it’s taken a lot out of me. I’m not feeling my best, mentally, physically or emotionally. Not that I won’t give school my all – it takes priority over work for me, really. I just don’t feel like I’ve got the drive I had the last two semesters.

As for my usual pre-semester freak-out, it’s not nearly as large. I think it will be do-able, although I’m sure there will be some moments of panic here and there. The material looks easy enough: the problem is that it’s all crammed into 7 weeks instead of 15. But here’s my semesterly list of things that really concern me anyway:

1. Both instructors have been changing the syllabus daily, even the assignments for the first day of class which is only days away.
2. My reference class calls for a lot of reading, and a lot of it seems redundant.
3. Boy, there’s an awful lot o’ stuff crammed in those 7 weeks.

I have no doubt I’ll survive though. I always make it through somehow.

Anyway, this trip is a quickie: I arrive on Friday night, and I leave on Monday morning. I don’t know how much blogging I’ll do or how many pictures I’ll take. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

A’s all the way, baby.

I got an A in my Use and Users of Info class, so it was a 4.0 for this semester, which brings my overall GPA to a 3.81. If only they had a “My daughter is an honor student at UIUC GSLIS” bumper sticker for my dad.

Dewey hasn’t done me wrong….

Yeah, I be speaking English super good today. Leave me alone.

Anyway, I thought I’d share that I got a perfect score on the Cataloguing final, resulting in an A for the semester. Go me! I’m no longer a straight A- student. I still have no word on my grade for the other class, but they’ll be posted on the web Monday.